Beatrice or Iseult? The debate about romantic love

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1997 by Thomas, Owen C

"Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love" ( 1941) in Outlines, ed. Hadfield.

The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (1943) (New York: Octagon Books, 1983).

2 De Rougemont's main work on the myth of romantic love was published as L'Amour et L'Occident in Paris in 1938. An English translation entitled Passion and Society was published in England in 1940. A revised edition entitled Love in the Western World was published in New York by Harper & Row in 1956. De Rougemont published an extended recasting of the argument in the introductory chapter of Love Declared, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). An augmented edition of Love in the Western World was published by Princeton Universit; Press in 1983 with a 53-page postscript. The pagination of this and the 1956 edition is the same.

3Outlines, p. 55. 4Ibid., p. 9. 5Ibid., pp. 9-10.

6Charles Williams, p. 79, quoting Vita Nuova, 11:1. 7Ibid., p. 75. 8Ibid., pp. 7L73.

9 Love in the Western Wor/d, p. 178. 10 Ibid., p. 98. 11 Ibid., p. 179.

12 Ibid.; emphasis added.

13 Figure of Beatrice, p. 101.

14 For a summary of Williams's doctrine of images, see Mary McDermott Shideler. The Theology of Romantic Love: A Study in the Writings of Charles Williams (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), ch. 1.

15 Charles Willis, pp. 85-86. 16 Figure of Beatrice, pp. 7-8.

17 Charles Williams, Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), quoted in Shideler, Theology of Romantic Love, p. 40.

18 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 21.

19 Outlines, p. 60.

20 Love in the Western World, pp. 312, 315. 21 Outlines, p. 67. 22 Ibid., p. 70. 23. Ibid.

24 Ibid., p. 97. 25 Figure of Beatrice, p. 15.

26 Shideler, Theology of Romantic Love, p. 208. 27 Ibid., pp. 2089; quoting Figure of Beatrice, p. 50. 28 Figure of Beatrice, pp. 4950. 29 Ibid., p. 100.

30Charles Williams, pp. 8689. 31 Love in the Western World, p. 312.

32 Ibid., pp. 313, 315. 33 Ibid., p. 312. 34 Ibid., p. 313.

35 "One Way of Love," in Charles Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 161.

36 Outlines, p. 111.